Dead Girl Blues

No, let’s make this personal:

No amount of awareness, of myself or of the world I live in, can alter who I am. I may be capable of changing my behavior, even as I crossed a state line, even as I sold one car and bought another, even as I changed my name.

I, who had been a drifter, had evolved into a homeowner. A husband and father, a family man, a creature of settled habits. I’d been in the same line of work almost as long as I’d been in Lima, and I owned the business now, and had enlarged it and made a modest success of it.

I, who had found it within myself to strangle a young woman and violate her dead body, now sat down to dinner every evening with my wife and son and daughter. And bowled in a league once a week. And—

Enough.

What, then, had become of Buddy? Had he been some sort of sociopathic larval stage, and had he subsequently emerged from his chrysalis a fully evolved human being?

It would be nice to think so.

But I sit here, staring at my computer screen, staring beyond it at the person I am and the life I’ve led, and it’s just not so, is it?

Buddy hasn’t gone anywhere. He’s still here. He acts differently, and in certain respects he sees himself and the world differently.

But has he grown a conscience?

No, I was quick to type just now, but then I backed up to amend it. Let’s make it Yes and no.

Because I am aware, in a way and to an extent that Buddy never was, of what I ought to do. And I have become in the habit over the years of following the suggestions of that particular inner voice.

Because it’s right? Because it’s what God or some equivalent thereof, some Divine stand-in, wants me to do? Because I’ll feel better about myself if I do the right thing?

No, I don’t think so.

I think I’ve learned that it’s prudent for me to do what this quasi-conscience prompts me to do. It’s in my interest, and I’m able to act in my own interest and override contrary impulses. In fact I’ve done so for long enough that I’m barely aware of those impulses.

But I continue, in my heart of hearts, in my essential self, to be a sociopath.

Let me be candid, even though my fingers balk at typing the words. I am sitting here, weighing possible courses of action circumstances might lead me to take. I have just told you that I love my wife, my son, my daughter.

And one course of action I find myself weighing, and indeed considering quite dispassionately, would have me annihilating my family.

Killing them all. Killing Louella, killing Alden, killing Kristin.

It’s been three days since the last entry. After I typed their names I sat looking at the screen, reading that paragraph over and over. I tried to find something else to write, to add to what I’d written, and what words came to me didn’t seem worth recording.

After a while I shut down the computer and went to bed.

And fell asleep right away, and slept soundly. And got up in the morning and took up my life where I’d left it, and didn’t walk into this home office of mine until evening, after the news and after Jeopardy. Opened the file, read the last three paragraphs, sat there thinking or not thinking for perhaps five minutes, and then shut things down again.

Did the same thing the following day. The day after that — which I guess was yesterday — I didn’t even come in here. Stood at the door, couldn’t think what I’d write, couldn’t think why I’d want to write anything.

I thought of the gun. Thought about Chekhov. Went downstairs to see what was on TV.

And here I am now.

It would be to spare them.

And that makes its particular sense to me, even as I recognize the notion as utterly ridiculous. Here are three people, three for whom I care as I never thought myself capable of caring for anyone, three people leading lives they clearly enjoy — and I actually find myself entertaining the thought of ending those lives.

I’m sure you find the thought appalling. I assure you that it is no less appalling to the man whose thought it is.

But if I don’t?

Because, you see, even as I love them, so do they love me. I’m the loving husband of one, the loving father of the others. While I rather doubt that they confuse me with Christ or Confucius or Captain America, and while I trust that there is something clear-eyed and balanced in their love, they surely think far more highly of me than I could ever think of myself.

They think I’m a good man.

And why shouldn’t they? I’ve never given them cause to think otherwise. In the life I’ve led, the life of which they’ve been a part, I have acted the part of a good man.

I’ve given a good performance. I’ve even managed at times to convince myself.

But what happens when the police cars pull up in front of our house? What happens when our doorbell rings and one of us answers it?

What happens when it all goes pear-shaped?

Disbelief, for a starter. They’ve made a mistake, they’ve come to the wrong house, they’ve got the wrong man. Somehow or other an error has been made, and somehow or other the husband and father they know and cherish has been linked to an atrocious act which could only have been committed by someone else.

But belief would come, quickly or slowly. One way or another, they would know the truth.

And then? I don’t know what would happen after that. I can envision any number of futures, but can’t know which one lies in store for us. Because we have free will? Or only because the predetermined scripts of our lives have been withheld from us?

Subjectively it would seem to amount to the same thing. The one thing that’s clear to me about the future is that it is to be dreaded. They will know the truth about me, as will everyone with whom I’m acquainted, all my fellow Kiwanians and Rotarians and Lions, the fellows I bowl with, the workers I employ...

And so on. The customers at the stores, in Lima and in Penderville. Everyone living in the area, really, everyone who looks at a television set or picks up a newspaper.

People I don’t know. People I’ve never met and will never meet. People all over the world, people who but for the miracle of DNA would never have heard of John James Thompson or Roger Borden or, God help us, Cindy Raschmann.

Of course I don’t have to hang around and see it through. I don’t need to find a lawyer and watch it all play out. Right now, sitting here, I could unlock the lower right desk drawer and put a bullet in my brain.

And that would end it. Barring the awful irony of life after death, I’d be out of it. It would be over for me.

But for them?

All the rest of the wretched scenario would continue to play out in my absence. Reporters would thrust microphones in Louella’s face, seeking details of her life with a rapist and murderer. Alden and Kristin would undergo something similar, and arguably worse.

I’d have gotten off easy, I’d have taken the coward’s way out, and I’d have left them to go through no end of hell on their own.

So. Three people, my wife and my son and my daughter, and they were the only persons on earth for or about whom I genuinely cared. If I killed them one by one in their sleep, if each was dead and gone in an instant, then when I went on to take my own life it would be over.

We’d all be safely gone. No one could touch us. No revelation of the truth could shatter our world of illusion, because we’d no longer be in that world or any other.

It would, of course, be a much bigger story than the simple resolution of a long-forgotten cold case. The monster who’d raped and murdered so many years ago would be entirely subsumed into the far more horrible monster who’d annihilated his entire family.

A bigger story, a more enduring story. But wouldn’t it be that tree falling in the forest, falling soundlessly because there was no ear present to hear it? If all four of us were gone, what could it matter what went on in the world we no longer occupied?

The gun’s in the drawer. The drawer is locked. The key is within my reach.

And here I sit.

Would I be committing the foulest and most despicable act imaginable, infinitely worse than what I’d done to Cindy Raschmann?

Or would it be an act of mercy?

I’ll have to think about this.

And did I?

My routine kept me busy. Up, shower, shave. Breakfast, and a second cup of coffee with Louella once the kids were on their way to school.

It was a pleasant morning. I’d have walked to work, but that would mean walking home at noon, because I’d need the car to get to my lunchtime Rotary meeting. I’d missed the last two or three meetings, and I didn’t care to lose contact.

The clubs had long since ceased to be important for the business connections they fostered. Thompson Dawes did what it did, never failing to turn a profit, never threatening to deliver genuine wealth. We’d survived Walmart and Costco and Home Depot, although each in turn had posed a threat. There’d be no new stores, and no Herculean efforts to grow the business.

A story I heard someone tell. A Scotsman, as thrifty by nature as his countrymen always are in such stories, is in a store inspecting an overcoat. He’s concerned about the garment’s durability; how long, he asks the saleswoman, is it likely to last?

She looks at him, she looks at the coat, she looks at him, she looks at the coat.

“It’ll see ye oot,” she says.

And Thompson Dawes will see us oot, yielding a satisfactory income for as long as Louella and I are around to spend it. That’s as long as it needs to last. Alden’s set on becoming a veterinarian, he’s never wavered in his enthusiasm, and it’s too early to guess what career might beckon to Kristin, although I can sometimes picture her as a stand-up comedian, or backstage writing lines for someone else to deliver.

Neither of them will want to be selling hammers and nails and pots and pans to the good people of Lima — or Penderville, for that matter. Thompson Dawes might stay in business with a new owner or two — and with a name change, no doubt.

Or the stores could close. I wasn’t concerned with leaving a commercial legacy. Neither my name nor that of Porter Dawes needed a spot in Lima’s pantheon of retailers.

Things I found myself thinking about, when I wasn’t thinking about murder and suicide.

I went to my meeting, heard a story or two, retold the one about the Scotsman and the coat when someone else wondered whether to trade his second car or try to get another year out of it.

“Well, I hope it won’t see me oot,” he said, “but I guess it’ll see me through another model year.”

I got caught up on some news, and learned that a man named Charles Kittredge had taken a turn for the worse, and his family had opted for at-home hospice care. I’d known Charles for a good deal longer than I’d been familiar with the word hospice, he’d already been an active Rotarian when I came to my first meeting, and while the end had been inevitable for the better part of a year, I hadn’t expected it to be this soon.

Charles and I — and it was always Charles, never Charlie or Chuck — were never close, but we saw each other often enough, and always in pleasant circumstances, to make each of us a part of the other’s social landscape.

Would I miss him?

I’d go to his funeral. I had the option of seeing him before then, I could contrive to stop by his home for a visit, but I knew I wasn’t going to do that. We weren’t close enough to warrant it. I’d wait for his death, and send flowers and a note to his widow.

And put on a suit and tie and go to his funeral. And think of him infrequently after that. If at all.

Things to occupy my mind, while I wasn’t busy weighing about the pros and cons of killing my family and myself.

“Dad? Have you got a minute?”

I had written that last paragraph, and spent perhaps five minutes sitting at my desk and looking at it. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to add.

Or to subtract, come to think of it.

And so I shut down and came downstairs and sat in my chair and picked up a novel Louella had read and recommended. So far I hadn’t made much headway, and I certainly didn’t mind the interruption.

Louella was in the kitchen, Kristin in front of the TV. Alden and I went out on the porch. He started to say something, then broke it off when someone roared by on a motorcycle. When the sound died down he said he wondered what it was like to ride one of those. I said I’d often wondered myself.

“But not enough to find out,” I said.

“I’d feel funny,” he said. “Making all that noise, interrupting all those conversations.”

“I suppose a person gets used to it.”

“I suppose. Dad? There was another email. For Kristin, but it came to me.”

“Another match.”

He nodded. “A man in Scottsdale, Arizona, and he’s a closer match than the others. Like he could be an aunt or an uncle. Except he couldn’t be an aunt because—”

“Because he’s a man.”

“Uh, right.”

“I don’t suppose they gave you his name.”

“Actually they did.”

“Oh?”

“It’s Henry Elmont Borden.”

My brother Hank. Had I ever known his middle name? I suppose I must have, but it didn’t ring any bells. Elmont. A family name, I suppose, and it imparted a certain distinction. There were probably hundreds of Henry Bordens, but there would have to be far fewer with Elmont for a middle name.

“And this email came in today?”

“Actually it was yesterday. I was going to mention it last night, but—”

“But there was no hurry.”

“I guess. Was that okay?”

“Perfectly okay,” I said. “You want to go for a ride?”

The radio came on when I started the engine, tuned to an oldies station. I turned it off and drove with no real destination in mind, letting the car find its way around the outer suburbs.

We were silent a while. Then I said, “Scottsdale’s outside of Phoenix. An upscale area, I believe. There’s an independent retailers’ trade association, Porter Dawes was a longtime member, and the annual dues are low enough that I’ve never canceled. They’ve had conventions in Scottsdale. I’ve never gone, never really considered it, but that’s what comes to mind when I think of Scottsdale.”

“And this man—”

“Lives there, evidently.”

He waited.

“My brother,” I said. “Henry, but most people called him Hank. Maybe he goes by Henry now, maybe he calls himself H. Elmont Borden. Was that the middle name? Elmont?”

“That’s what it said.”

“Henry Elmont Borden. There were ten of us, I had all of these brothers and sisters. I wonder how many of them are still around. I suppose we’ll find out, through the miracle of genetic analysis.”

“Dad, I never meant for this to happen.”

“Don’t blame yourself. There was no way for you to see it coming.”

“I just didn’t think.”

And what did he think now? That there was something in the past that I felt a need to avoid, but did he have an idea what it might be?

I looked for a place to pull over, found a strip mall, its handful of stores closed for the day. There were only two vehicles in the lot, a panel truck and an SUV, parked side by side in front of an auto parts outlet. I pulled into a spot at the far end, cut the engine.

“When I first came here,” I said, “I had to cross a lot of state lines. I grew up out West.”

“I think I knew that.”

“What else do you know?”

“Huh?”

“Or suspect. You must have some sense of the situation.”

He had his hands in his lap, resting on his seatbelt strap, and his eyes were fastened on them. He said, “I know there’s something in the past that could be a problem if it comes to light.”

“And can you guess what it might be?”

“Not really.” He turned, looked at me. “It really doesn’t matter what it is, you know? What you did, or what somebody thought you did, or whatever it was. It’s been buried for all these years and all it has to do is stay buried, and if I hadn’t been stupid enough to mail off that DNA swab—”

“Then we would have gotten to the same place by some other route,” I said. “So you can quit blaming yourself.”

“If you say so, but—”

“I was a very different man,” I said. “Rootless, drifting. No sense of a social order, no sense of my place in it. No perspective on the thoughts that came to me. Or what I did about them, because I didn’t have much in the way of impulse control.”

He was sitting in silence, eyes lowered.

“Do you know what a sociopath is?”

“Sort of.”

“The definition varies, depending on what dictionary you consult. But if you checked an illustrated dictionary it would show you a picture of Buddy.”

“Buddy? Was that what people called you?”

“Only if they were reading the embroidery on my shirt pocket. One of the jobs I had, I was a few years older than you are now. I was pumping gas down in Southern California.”

“You weren’t still living at home.”

I shook my head. “I would pick up a job, sleep in my car until I found a room, hang around for a while, then move on. Pumping gas — this was before gas stations figured out that people could fill their own gas tanks and wipe their own windshields, so they’d pay minimum wage to a guy like me. Someone who had the job before me left this shirt behind, Buddy in script on the breast pocket, and it was my size so I got it washed and wore it.” I frowned. “I think I got it washed,” I said, “but maybe not. I tended to be a little casual about such matters.”

He sat there, taking it all in.

“One job I had, I cleaned out the cash register before I took off. But that was because I didn’t like the manager’s attitude. It’s funny, I can picture the man’s face, but I can’t remember what he did or said or why it bothered me.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“A very long time ago, and you could say that I was a different person then. And maybe I was and maybe I wasn’t.”

He didn’t say anything, and we let that last sentence hang in the air for a moment.

I said, “I should get to the point. Your mother’s probably ready to put dinner on the table. One night after work I was still wearing the Buddy shirt and I went to a bar to get a beer, and I did something. And I’m having trouble coming right out and saying what it was that I did.”

“You don’t have to say anything, Dad.”

“I killed someone,” I said.

Another sentence to leave hanging in the air, except this time the words darted around, bounced off the dashboard, echoed and somehow grew louder in the silence. I lowered a window, not so much to let a little air in as to give the words a way out.

“A woman,” I said. “Her name was Cindy Raschmann, but I didn’t know her name until later, and she never knew mine. All she knew was what it said on my shirt. ‘Hey, it’s Buddy.’ I remember she spoke those words early on. I don’t remember anything else she said.”

Except for what she’d said so many years later, in what must have been a dream but seemed much more real than any dream I ever had. She’d said those same words again, Hey, it’s Buddy, and she’d added a few more sentences. I wrote them down earlier when they were fresh in my mind but I won’t bother looking for them now.

And then she said I forgive you.

“I killed her,” I said.

“It was an accident.”

What a fine son he was. What a decent and loyal and generous young man. Could I accept the gift he was offering?

Evidently not.

“It wasn’t an accident,” I said. “And I wasn’t drunk. I’d had one glass of beer and I don’t even think I finished it. We left the bar together.”

Memories flooded in, but I didn’t feel the need to find words for them. I skipped ahead.

“I wound up with my hands around her throat,” I said. “I didn’t let go until she was dead.”

“And then I fucked her corpse.”

But no, I didn’t say that.

The next thing I did say, breaking an extended silence, was an apology. Not for the act but for the recounting of it.

“I never expected to tell you all this,” I said. “I never thought I’d have reason to. I assumed the past would stay in the past.”

“But I had to go and—”

I stopped him right there. “If you need to blame someone,” I said, “stick with Crick and Watson. Once the science was there, the technology was sure to follow. Then all they had to do was find uses for it, and everything just kept evolving. Keeps evolving, because there’s something new every time you turn around. Touch DNA, for God’s sake. Early on they needed bodily fluids to get enough cells for a DNA profile. Now any contact between two people transfers enough DNA for them to work with.”

“I don’t really get how that works,” he said, “but I guess it does.”

“Say our hands touch,” I said, “and some of what’s on my hand winds up on your hand. That case a week or two ago on 48 Hours, the serial rapist who followed women home from Walmart.”

“I think it was Target. Like it makes a difference.”

“It evidently made a difference to him. I guess you meet a more appealing class of women at Target. He used condoms.”

“I remember.”

“And disposed of them elsewhere. He wasn’t afraid of picking up an STD.”

“Or getting anybody pregnant.”

“He knew about semen and DNA,” I said, “and he thought he was playing it safe. What would he have done if he’d known about Touch DNA? Worn gloves?”

“Or one of those HazMat suits.”

I was picturing that, or trying to, and he said, “Dad? After you...”

“Killed her,” I supplied.

I thought he might flinch at the words, but no. “Then what happened? You just left?”

“Drove for awhile, found a motel room. I was a drifter, so I drifted. It seems to me I was waiting for them to catch me. But they didn’t, and I don’t know how close they may have come or how much they learned from the crime scene or in the course of their investigation. But then Sirhan Sirhan came along.”

“Who?”

“The guy who assassinated Bobby Kennedy.”

“Right,” he said. “I knew the name, but not how I knew it, and you want to know the first thing I thought just now? That it was the name of a band.”

“Or a rapper.”

“Li’l Sirhan. This was really a long time ago, wasn’t it?” He drew a breath and straightened up in his seat. I picked up the cue, if that’s what it was, and keyed the ignition and drove us home.

Somewhere between the strip mall and our house he found an oblique way to ask me if there were any other entries keeping Cindy Raschmann company in my résumé.

I assured him I’d never before done anything of the sort. But I said I had thought about it. It was a fantasy, I said, a longstanding one, and I’d figured that was all it would ever be.

“And you never—”

“Did anything like that again? No, never.”

He nodded, grateful for the assurance, but something kept me from leaving it at that. “I thought about it,” I said.

“Oh.”

“There were times when I might have acted.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No, never. And the impulse—”

“Went away?”

“Subsided,” I said.

At the dinner table, it was as if we’d never had the conversation. Louella had made a lamb stew, tweaking a recipe she’d prepared in the past, pepping it up with cumin and cayenne.

“And I used the slow cooker,” she said, “instead of the pressure pot. And I must say I felt the slightest bit disloyal.”

They looked at her.

“The first conversation I ever had with your father,” she said, “was at the store, over a pressure cooker.”

“We talked about rhubarb,” I said.

“And I brought that pressure cooker home with me, and it’s held up perfectly well over the years.”

“Better than I have,” I said.

“You’ve both held up beautifully,” she said, “and I’ve never cooked rhubarb in anything else.”

How I Met Your Father. Louella reminisced, and I contributed a recollection or two of my own. This wasn’t the first trip the four of us had taken down Memory Lane, and Alden and Kristin seemed as usual to enjoy this back-in-the-day glimpse of their parents.

I had to wonder, though, what Alden made of it, now that our conversation at the strip mall had put me in a different light. Or could he just wall that off and keep it at a safe distance from the rhubarb and the pressure cooker?

When we left the table I told Alden I’d be upstairs in my office. “Why don’t you give me, oh, half an hour? Forty-five minutes?”

I sat down at my desk and got to it right away, recreating our conversation as you see it above. I typed the last sentence and looked at it for a long moment, wondering if I had anything further to add. I decided that I didn’t, and had just closed the file when there was a knock on the door.

I looked at my watch. He’d given me a full hour.

I told him to come in, pointed to a chair. It’s a comfortable chair, but he didn’t look all that comfortable in it. And I could understand that. I’d already provided an unbidden confession to homicide. Who could say what I might come up with next?

“You probably have some questions,” I said.

He shrugged.

“Like why did I decide to tell you all this.”

“I guess I wondered.”

“I never expected to. When I started driving east, I’d reached a point where it was beginning to look as though I might get away with it. By the time I got to Ohio I had a new name and some ID to go with it. I began to create a completely new life for myself, and I figured the past could stay in the past.”

“But then with DNA—”

“Not just DNA. The whole business of cold case investigation. The world’s changing at a pace that makes your head spin, and one big change is that there’s no getting away from the past. It’s right there in the present.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“If you go back, oh, say a hundred years ago. No, make it a little more than that. A hundred and fifty years, say. All the way back to the days of the Old West. Think of those movies and TV shows that open with a guy on a horse, riding across the prairie and into town. Whatever past he may have had, he could just leave it behind — in some other town.

“His name was whatever he called himself. Nobody could ask to see a man’s ID, because he didn’t have any and neither did anybody else. Your story was whatever you said it was, and unless somebody from your past rode into town, you could live your new life and forget about your old one.”

He was nodding, getting the picture. “No security cameras,” he said.

“They were pretty scarce as recently as twenty years ago. Liquor stores and other retailers in high-crime areas had them, but they didn’t work all that well, and people would forget to maintain them. Porter Dawes had one, just a single camera aimed at the checkout counter, and one of my duties was rewinding the tape at closing time and setting it up for the next day. Now we’ve got four cameras inside the store and one outside, and they’re digital and they pretty much maintain themselves. And that’s in a store that’s never been held up even once.”

We talked about the cameras, and what deterrent value they might have for potential shoplifters. As far as robbery went, we were an unlikely target in the first place, and became less of one each year, as our proportion of credit card sales increased.

We’d wandered off the subject, but that was all right. A father and son, enjoying the back-and-forth of a conversation. When it had run its course, or at least as much of its course as it needed to run, I said, “You didn’t expect all this when you started to tell me about my brother Hank.”

“I don’t know what I expected, Dad.”

“But not this conversation.”

“No, I guess not.”

“Neither did I. I wanted that whole part of my life to stay in Bakersfield.”

“That’s where it happened?”

“And that’s where I’d come to believe I’d left it. Like that cowboy, riding into town and starting over. I’ve been living that new life for all these years, to the point where I barely remember the old life, and the man I used to be.”

“Buddy,” he said.

“Buddy’s gone,” I said, “and it’s not hard to let myself believe he never really existed in the first place. I didn’t think anyone would find a way to follow his trail all the way east to Ohio. And I didn’t think anyone here would ever have to know anything about what happened back there.”

He thought about that, took it in, nodded.

“When forensic analysis improved, when the whole business of cold case investigation started making headlines and showing up on TV, what bothered me most wasn’t the prospect of a trial and a prison sentence. It was that you and your mother would know who I was and what I’d done.”

“Mom doesn’t know any of this.”

“No. But you’d both find out in a hurry if they came knocking on the door. And your sister, too, and I can’t even wrap my mind around that.”

“No.”

I closed my eyes for a moment, picked my words carefully. I said, “It was hard to have this conversation. But it kept getting harder not to have it.”

“I think I know what you mean.”

“One thing that bothered me, and I don’t even know how conscious I was of it, but in order to keep this particular secret, I had to consign all of my past life to the shadows. There were all these things about me that I couldn’t let you know. For God’s sake, I have nine brothers and sisters! That’s nine aunts and uncles that you were never going to know about. I won’t pretend we were close, but they existed, and you had a right to know about them, and I couldn’t tell you. Of course they’re not blood kin of yours, but—”

“They might as well be,” he said. “You’re my dad, they’re your brothers and sisters, so that makes them my uncles and aunts. And I don’t even know how much blood matters, but it’s a fact that they’re blood kin to Kristy.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“DNA and all,” he said.

DNA and all.

I felt better for our conversation, I told him. It had relieved me of some inner tension. We talked a little more, and then he went off to do homework and I sat down and recorded our conversation.

You’re my Dad. Three words, uttered with no particular inflection, yet they’d put a lump in my throat and kept coming back to me.

And indeed I am. And Kristin’s dad as well, and Louella’s husband. I’m J. J. Thompson, long-established local retailer, member of various civic-minded fraternal organizations. Infrequent churchgoer, once-a-week bowler. A family man. A man, as I believe I’ve already called myself, of settled habits.

I’m all those things. I’m also Buddy, and Roger before that.

“You’re my dad.”

I type the words and I can hear him saying them, and they continue to move me. And they bring to mind another three-word statement which they seem to echo:

“I forgive you.”

And I find myself at the brink of tears. But I don’t have to hold them back. They hold themselves back.

I wrote the previous entry four days ago. Shut down the computer, went downstairs, and went on with my life. The following day I never even walked into my office, and the day after that I found myself thinking that this journal (if I want to call it that, and I suppose it’s as good a word as any) — that this journal had served a purpose and been a valuable outlet, but that its time had come and gone and now I was done with it.

Perhaps I ought to delete the file. Or, because deletion is such an uncertain and inconclusive process, perhaps what I really ought to do is junk the computer after having destroyed its hard drive.

It’s probably due for a replacement, anyway. I don’t know how many years I’ve owned it, but certainly two or three years longer than I’ve owned my car. Every two or three years a man will spend money on a car that’s not substantially different from the one he’s trading in; computers, meanwhile, evolve far more rapidly, yet we keep them as long as we can.

And I’ve had this thought, and will doubtless have it again, and I’ll keep this laptop (which wouldn’t dream of complaining even as I peck away at its keys) until it breaks down and makes the decision for me.

As I said, it’s been four days. And it might have been several more, there’s no way of guessing how long it might have been, but for the show that aired tonight on Dateline.

A cold case solved. A woman in eastern Tennessee, not far from Knoxville, who’d laced up her Nikes and gone for a run eighteen years ago.

And never came home.

There’d been the usual reports, sightings from as far away as Denver, but they never panned out. She was presumed dead, and likely buried, tucked deep in some patch of earth where she wouldn’t be found.

They were fairly sure it was the husband, and it didn’t help his cause when he flunked a polygraph test. But he’d stayed with his story — she went out, she didn’t come back, I got no idea where she went to — and polygraph results aren’t admissible evidence. The local DA decided they didn’t have enough of a case to take to court, and if they’d tried, a defense attorney could have pointed out that she had a sort-of boyfriend, her occasional running partner, and while both his alibi and his own polygraph results had cleared him as far as the police were concerned, his role in her life might be enough to a jury to constitute an alternate theory of the crime, leading to reasonable doubt.

And there was no body. You always needed a much stronger case when you didn’t have a body to point to.

So the husband was never charged, let alone convicted, but everybody thought he’d done it, his kids included, and within a year he’d sold up and relocated to Baton Rouge. He moved a few more times over the years, and by the time they found the body he was in a halfway house in Medford, Oregon, fresh out of his latest stint of rehab and working in a car wash.

It was an old man with a metal detector who found her. After a lifetime of teaching history at the University of Tennessee, he’d settled on two hobbies to enliven his retirement. He foraged for edible wild plants, and while he gathered them he scanned the ground with a metal detector, turning up musket balls and stray coins and no end of rings from pop-top beer cans.

The woman — I could let Google supply her name, but what difference does it make? Although she’d been buried with her wedding ring on her finger, it seems unlikely that would have been enough to set his device humming. But she’d broken a femur some years back, and the repair of the fracture had entailed implanting a metal rod, and, well, you get the picture.

He started digging, and when he began finding bones he picked up his phone and called it in.

They went to Oregon to pick up the husband, who’d needed a minute to figure out what wife they were talking about; he’d been married and divorced twice since then, and opioid use had left him a little vague. Yes, he confirmed, they’d inserted a metal rod when they fixed her leg, and if it was titanium it was probably worth a couple of dollars, and he supposed it was nice that they found her, but it still had nothing to do with him. Wasn’t him that killed her, or dug a hole and left her in it.

And, remarkably, he was right about that. While they were checking DNA to make sure it was in fact the running lady they’d found, they came across some other DNA and figured it was the husband’s, which would wrap up the case against him and tie a bow on it.

Nope. It was the boyfriend’s. His wife had divorced him early on, and he’d left her with the house and kids and moved to East Texas. He’d remarried and had two more children, he’d set himself up again as an optometrist, he mowed his lawn and kept up with his garden, he coached his younger daughter’s soccer team — and he hadn’t seemed at all surprised when they came knocking on his door. The case against him was way short of being a slam-dunk, but he invited the officers in and poured them glasses of iced tea and told them everything. Waived extradition, accompanied them voluntarily to Knox County to await trial, where on advice of counsel he repudiated his confession, withdrew his initial Guilty plea, and wound up backing his way into a life sentence.

While the story was unfolding, I waited for some relative’s DNA from 23 and Me to kickstart the cold case, because nowadays that’s always what I’m waiting for. But that never had a chance to play a role; they’d had both men’s DNA on file all along, the innocent husband and the guilty boyfriend, and all they had to do was run the usual tests. They did, and that was that.

But this case resonated in another way entirely. If there’s a God, it shows him to be the Supreme Ironist. Here you’ve got two men, the husband and the boyfriend, and both their lives take the path you’d pretty much expect them to take. The husband, clearly guilty despite the legal presumption of innocence, had gone downhill in a hurry, stumbling almost inevitably into alcoholism and opioid addiction, with a good chance of dying of an overdose when his latest stint in rehab proved no more enduring than the ones preceding it. Unpunished by the law, perhaps, but punished by life.

Meanwhile the boyfriend, presumed innocent not only by the legal system but by all concerned, had shrugged off the breakup of his marriage and created an exemplary new life for himself. He’d been genuinely successful, not merely in his profession but as a husband and father. You can make of it what you will, but his daughter’s soccer team hadn’t lost a match all season.

And he was the one who was guilty, and who’d be spending the rest of his life in prison — while his new wife and kids tried to come to terms with the turn their lives had taken.

You might say it got my attention.

I came up here to write about it, and didn’t stop to wonder why I felt the need to do so. Nothing Dateline had to report changes my situation in any way that I can see. But the story has had an impact, which probably shouldn’t be surprising, and sitting here and tapping keys and forming words and sentences on the screen seems to be the way I’ve found for processing the thoughts in my mind and the events in my life. I don’t know that it helps me to put things in perspective, whatever that means, but it’s what I’ve taught myself to do, and I suspect I do it for a reason.

I wonder what Alden made of it.

We’d all four sat down to watch the show, but fifteen minutes in Kristin yawned theatrically and went to her room to play a video game. Louella wandered into the kitchen from time to time, she had something in the oven that required her occasional attention, but Alden and I never stirred from our seats.

Now and then I’d glance over at him, and a couple of times our eyes met. I don’t know what he was thinking, but I could probably guess.

Alden wade Shipley Thompson.

He was a young man, but he was also a boy, and what a load I’d given him to carry. Had I been right or wrong to share my secret with him?

The answer would be easier to furnish if I knew for certain how much would ever be known about the death of Cindy Raschmann. Would a pair of cops from California come knocking on our door?

It was one thing if they did, another if they didn’t.

And they might not. Investigations stall out. A case that had been so cold for so many years might never warm up enough to lead anywhere. There was no telling how good their DNA sample had been, or how much it might have degraded over the years. Or if they’d misplaced the damned thing, and given up looking for it.

And state and local governments were increasingly handicapped by budget cuts, and I would think they’d have to practice a sort of triage in cold case investigations, allocating resources to the ones they had the best chance of resolving — or with the higher profiles, or those in which the victim’s next of kin made the most insistent demands for closure.

Closure. That’s right up there with perspective. I don’t know what the hell it means.

And one hears it all the time. “I had to stay with the case,” a dogged lawman will tell the camera, “because I felt it was my job to bring those good people closure.”

And, when they presumably have achieved it, when the guilty verdict comes down and the sentence is read and the killer led off to spend the rest of his life in prison, where’s the closure? Aside from a measure of mean-spirited satisfaction, what those friends and relatives give off most is a sense of disappointment.

She’s still dead. Life goes on, and so does death, and now what? Is that all there is?

If they came for me, the conversation I’d had with Alden would take a little of the shock and horror out of what followed. He’d be able to comfort his mother, to reassure his sister.

And if they never did show up?

I stopped there, slept on the question, woke up with what feels like the answer. Perhaps a night’s sleep has given me a measure of perspective, if not closure.

I’m closer to Alden for our having had that conversation, for his knowing the awful truth about the man who has become his father. If the case of Cindy Raschmann remains cold forever, if the most unsettling visitors ever to ring our doorbell are Jehovah’s Witnesses and cookie-peddling Girl Scouts, there’s still more good than bad in having revealed myself to my son.

No closure here, I’m afraid. I’ve managed to answer one question only to raise another.

That last entry was made the day before yesterday, typed out quickly before I went down for breakfast.

The forecast was for rain, so I drove to Thompson Dawes, and caught the news on the radio. An item drew my attention as I was pulling into my parking space, and I stayed put long enough to hear it through to the end.

It concerned a man in Missouri who’d been doing twenty years to life in a state penitentiary for killing a woman. There was no new evidence, and couldn’t be; the crime had been witnessed, the physical evidence supported the conviction, and he’d confessed immediately and never tried to repudiate the confession.

Six months ago a judge had ordered his release. The prisoner was 76 years old, and had spent almost half his life in a cell, and had reached an age where he was certainly no threat to society.

So they let him go, and in less than six months the son of a bitch did it again. Got himself a hunting knife, the sort you’d use to skin out a deer, and killed a middle-aged woman with a single stab wound to the heart. She was, as far as anyone could determine, a stranger to him, and if he had a motive he’d thus far kept it to himself.

All morning long I kept thinking of all concerned — the man himself, the two women he’d killed some forty years apart, and the judge whose re-election now seemed unlikely.

What did it mean? And why did it seem to possess some significance, still annoyingly unclear, for me?

It never did rain.

That was yesterday.

Woke up this morning to a clear day, cool but not cold. I took the car because I’d need to drive to a lunchtime meeting, but I’d already pretty much decided to skip it, and at noon when I got behind the wheel I didn’t even think about heading downtown.

I hadn’t been aware of making a decision, hadn’t gone to sleep with the conscious hope that I’d wake up with an answer. But evidently a decision had made itself, and an unasked question had been answered.

I drove home. The garage was empty, so Louella had gone somewhere.

A supermarket visit? Probably.

I went to the living room, turned the TV on and off again, picked up a magazine. I paged through it, and it wasn’t long before I heard her car in the driveway. By the time I got outside she had the trunk open and was lifting a bag of groceries. I took it from her, and she drew a second bag out of the trunk, and I followed her inside.

“Well, this is a surprise,” she said. “I thought you had Kiwanis today.”

“They can get along without me.”

“While I,” she said, “cannot.”

We kissed, and she stepped back and looked at me. Her expression of mild puzzlement was understandable. I was very much a creature of habits, and coming home at noon, unannounced and for no particular reason, was not one of them.

But she was not alarmed. Whatever had brought me home, she could wait for it to reveal itself.

I said, “I was a little concerned about you.”

“About me?”

“This morning, before I left the house.”

“At breakfast?”

“Your energy level,” I said. “Have you been feeling all right?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “At least I thought I was fine, until you raised the subject just now. What exactly—”

“You just seem very tired to me,” I said. “Sleepy, even.”

“Sleepy.”

“As if you didn’t get enough sleep last night, and now you can barely keep your eyes open.”

Her face softened, her eyes brightened. “Now that you mention it—”

“You’re tired, aren’t you?”

“Exhausted,” she said, “and isn’t it funny how I wasn’t even aware of it myself?”

“Well, sometimes it’s easier for another person to spot these things.”

“That must be it.”

“Especially when it’s another person who knows you very well.”

“Almost better than I know myself,” she said. “My goodness, here I am, as tired as I’ve ever been. I really ought to be in bed.”

“You really should.”

“And here you are,” she said, moving to the staircase. “Home for lunch.”

“Isn’t it funny how things work out?”

“Oh, it is,” she said. “It is indeed.”

“Oh my,” she said, a while later.

“Feel better now?”

Her answer was a low chuckle.

“I guess you needed that nap.”

“And I guess your lunch was worth the drive home. Or did you walk? No, you took the car.”

“I had the car,” I said, “but my lunch would have been worth it if I walked. Or even if I crawled on my belly like a reptile.”

That put her in mind of measuring worms, and their curious manner of locomotion, and we both remembered something we’d seen on TV, some penitent Asian monk who made his way to some sacred shrine in a manner which could only have been inspired by a measuring worm. We speculated on what sort of sin could inspire such a performance, and why this had seemed to him to be a reasonable way to expiate it. And then the conversation wandered here and there, in a less systematic fashion than either the monk or the measuring worm might have chosen.

Among other things, I told her I loved her, and she said she loved me. And she yawned and stretched and said, as each of us has remarked often over the years, how very lucky we were to have found each other.

I said, “I hope you still feel that way at the day’s end.”

“I’ll probably still be glowing,” she said, and then my words registered and her face showed concern.

“There’s a conversation we need to have,” I told her.

She sat up. “Are you all right? Darling, should I call a doctor?”

Not a doctor, I thought. Maybe a lawyer.

What I said was, “No, I’m fine. But there are things I need to tell you, and I don’t know where to begin.”

And that’s how I got started, by confessing that I wasn’t sure where to begin, or how. That may have been as good a way as any. It got the words flowing.

It’s not important what words I found or what order I put them in. At the onset I would hear the words first in my head, so that I could choose what to say and what to leave unsaid, but it wasn’t long before that little echo-in-advance went silent, and I just went ahead and said what I had to say.

I talked for a long time, although I couldn’t say how long. I didn’t note the time I got started, and I wasn’t really conscious of time throughout. I was sitting up in bed beside her when I began, and I never changed position. Nor did she, stretched out on her side next to me. I would glance at her from time to time, but mostly my eyes, focused on nothing in particular, were aimed at the foot of the bed.

Where Cindy Raschmann had been standing when she told me I was forgiven.

When I did look at Louella, I couldn’t read much of anything in her expression. She appeared attentive throughout, and when I paused so that she could offer a comment or a question, she supplied neither, simply waiting for me to continue.

I wondered at this. Over the years I’ve a couple of times been called upon to give a talk to one of my groups, and I’ve learned to draw energy from my audience, seeking out with my eyes those visibly receptive listeners whose nods and facial expressions urge me along like a silent amen chorus. I wasn’t getting any of that now, as I sought the understanding and acceptance of the most important audience I’d ever addressed.

But I can see now that she gave me throughout my performance precisely the response I required. She listened, she paid close attention, she took it all in — and she gave me the space to go on.

And what did I say? What did I withhold?

You’d think I’d remember it all word for word, or close to it. But I don’t, and I’m hard put to explain why.

What matters, I suppose, is that I uttered the words, not that my recollection of them is imperfect.

I know I talked far more than I’d expected to about my childhood and my family. It was unusual for me to think much about those years, although Alden’s reports on Kristin’s long-lost second cousins did spark memories. Two of my older brothers, one teasing the other about a girl. A sister, curiously incapable of learning how to ride a two-wheel bicycle, then just as curiously mastering the whole business in a couple of hours.

This and that...

I paused just now and scrolled up to read the account I’ve written of the murder I committed, and of the pleasure I took in it and in the sexual performance that followed it. My recital this afternoon was less detailed.

I suppose that’s only natural. One wants to be honest and forthcoming, but one balks at revealing oneself to be a monster.

When I stopped, when I had finally run out of words, she acknowledged that I was done talking by laying her hand lightly upon mine. The warm touch of her fingers on the back of my hand moved me beyond words.

“I’m glad you told me,” she said, “and not the Rotary Club.”

Kiwanis, I thought.

“I mean Kiwanis,” she said, as if I’d spoken the word aloud. “You came home so that you could tell me.”

“Yes.”

“But first you made love to me.”

“Yes.”

She didn’t say anything, so I answered the question she hadn’t asked.

“I thought it might be our last time,” I said. “Once you knew the truth—”

“I’d be horrified? Sickened?”

“Are you?”

She took time to think about it. “I knew there was something,” she said. “Each of us had a life before we found each other, and that’s fine, nobody needs to know every last detail about anybody else. I had an uncle who molested me. I never told you that.”

“No.”

“I was really little. Like five or six. Can you imagine wanting to have sex with someone that age? A little child?”

“No.”

“It happened twice. He said he had something to show me, and that I would like it, and what he did was take down my panties and lick me. For, I don’t know, a few minutes. Then he stopped and pulled my panties back up again and pulled my skirt down and told me I was a wonderful beautiful little girl and I must never say a word to anybody about what we’d just done. And I never did.”

“Until now.”

“Until now. And I still haven’t told you the worst part of all. I liked it.”

“You weren’t frightened?”

“I probably should have been, but it never occurred to me. I just loved the way it felt. In fact I adored it. What?”

“What?”

“The expression on your face.”

“Oh,” I said. “What I was thinking—”

“I know what you were thinking. ‘You still do.’ ”

“Well?”

She took a deliberate breath. “The second time,” she said, “must have been two or three weeks later. Maybe more. I wonder why he waited so long.”

“Could have been guilt,” I suggested. “Or fear, or a combination of the two. He’d done something awful, and as long as you kept quiet he’d get away with it, and now he had to make sure it never happened again.”

“And then he looked at me and found me utterly irresistible?”

“Something like that.”

“I wonder. Anyway, the two of us were alone, and he asked me if I’d like to have some fun. And of course I knew what he meant. And I sat on the couch next to him, and my skirt went up and my panties came down and this time I didn’t have to wonder what was going on, or decide how I felt about it.”

“And you still liked it?”

“Oh, God, I loved it. I don’t think I had an orgasm. Is it possible for a girl that age to have an orgasm?”

“I’m afraid that’s outside my area of expertise.”

‘I think it’s possible, because I think if he’d kept it up a few more minutes I would have had one then and there. But I guess he had one of his own, because he trembled and made this moaning sound, and before I knew it I had my panties on again and he was telling me what he’d told me the first time. How wonderful I was, and how this had to be our little secret.”

“And there was no third time?”

“No, and I was waiting for it. I didn’t really think much about it after the first time. It happened and I liked it, but I didn’t even think enough about it to wonder if it would happen again. But after the second time, well, I thought about it a lot. In fact I would be thinking about it and I would touch myself.”

“And imagine your finger was Uncle Don?”

“Uncle Howie. His name was Howard Desmond, he was married to my Aunt Pauline. My father had two sisters, both of them younger than himself, and Aunt Pauline was the younger of the two. I don’t know what I was thinking about when I touched myself. It just felt good and I liked making myself feel good.”

“And Uncle Howie—”

“Died.”

“Oh.”

“He was driving and he lost control of the car. I was too young to go to the funeral. I wonder how old a child has to be to go to a funeral. I suppose it varies from family to family, and it depends how close you were to the deceased.”

“And you were closer than anybody realized.”

“I wonder,” she said, “if anybody knew anything. Maybe I wasn’t the first little girl Uncle Howie mistook for an ice cream cone. And you know what else I wonder? It was, I don’t know, just a few years ago, that somebody on TV was talking about unwitnessed single-car accidents, and how they’re a way to commit suicide and get away with it.”

“If you’re dead, how exactly are you getting away with it?”

“The stigma. Or insurance, where they wouldn’t pay if they could prove you killed yourself.”

“That’s what people think,” I said. “That suicide invalidates an insurance claim, but that’s hardly ever the case if a policy’s been in force for a certain amount of time. After a year or two, it won’t get them off the hook.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“But you’re thinking your uncle killed himself.”

“When he supposedly lost control of the car,” she said, “he ran it into one of the concrete pillars supporting the Lyons Avenue overpass. ‘That’s where your Uncle Howie had his accident.’ I remember hearing that more than once when I was in a car and we were driving past where it happened. And maybe it was an accident, because people do lose control of their cars and drive into things like bridge abutments, but if nobody was there to see him do it, it’s like that tree in the forest.”

“The one that fell without making a sound.”

“That’s the one. Once the possibility occurred to me, and this was years and years after the fact—”

“When you heard something on TV.”

“Right. Were the grownups in the family wondering about this all along? There’s nobody to ask, they’re all long gone. No way to know if it was really an accident. Or if it was half an accident, if he’d had a few drinks and was driving too fast and has this sudden impulse and swung the steering wheel hard right.”

“And stomped the accelerator instead of the brake.”

“ ‘Oh, the hell with it.’ Like that, maybe.”

“And what you’re really wondering,” I said, “is what if anything you had to do with it.”

“If he did it on purpose, it could have been anything. Fear of exposure. Fear of what he might do next. Hating himself for what he was. I mean, there’s no way of knowing.”

“No.”

“People suffer from depression. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with what’s going on in their lives. I don’t feel guilty about it, because I didn’t do anything. I honestly don’t blame myself.”

“Good, because you shouldn’t.”

“But I wonder,” she said, “about what would have happened if he’d kept the car on the road. I’ll tell you one thing that did happen. I stopped thinking about what we did. Or what he did, I guess I should say. You know, skirt up, panties down.”

“Tongue extended.”

She rolled her eyes. “I didn’t think about it. It had to do with Uncle Howie, and he was gone forever, and I would never see him again. And that was sad, so the thing to do was to stop thinking of him. I sort of forgot about it, and I even forgot to touch myself, at least for a while. I, uh, rediscovered that part later.”

“What a hot little girl you were.”

“Oh, not really. You want to know something? Nobody ever did that to me again until—”

“Until what? Until you were married? Until you ran into Martina Navratilova at that bar on Railroad Avenue?”

“Idiot. Until I went out to buy a pressure cooker and wound up with the man of my dreams.”

“But you’d been married.”

“And it wasn’t a bad marriage, and Duane and I had an okay time in bed, but oral sex was never a part of it. He never initiated it and I never thought about it.”

“You never thought about it.”

“I honestly didn’t. I was a little kid when it happened, and I walled it off in my mind and forgot about it. I certainly never had the thought Oh now that I’m married I can do what I did with Uncle Howie.” She frowned. “I suppose it must have been traumatic, but it never felt that way.”

“And you never told anybody.”

“Well, he said not to, didn’t he? And what about you? You never said anything.”

“Until now.”

“You told Alden. It’s funny, when the two of you came home the other night I knew there was something that happened. I thought maybe you’d had one of those talks where you tell him to always wear a condom. You know, fatherly advice. Guy stuff.”

“Not exactly.”

And I said that I’d given Alden an edited version of my history, shorter and less detailed. But wasn’t what she’d just heard itself an edited version? I hadn’t supplied every thought that went through my mind, every impulse, every feeling. I’d recounted a great deal of what I’ve recorded in this unending electronic document, but by no means all of it.

And hasn’t this document itself had the services of an internal but always present editor? Don’t I choose what to put down and what to leave out?

We talked for a long time. At one point she got up and showered, and when she’d finished I took her place in the shower, and we put on clothes and went down to the kitchen and ate sandwiches and drank coffee and talked some more.

A lot of it was speculation. What might happen, and how likely it was, and how we could respond to one or another scenario. Thoughts arose, and we chased them down and examined them.

There were times, too, when the conversation would stop. Shared silences.

“I never knew you owned a gun,” she said.

“How would you know? It’s tucked away in a locked drawer.”

“Promise me you’ll never use it.”

I’d told her I’d thought of it as a last-ditch emergency exit, a way out if there was no other way out. When the men from Bakersfield climbed onto the porch and knocked on the door, I could put the gun to my head and spare myself what otherwise would follow.

I hadn’t told her another way I’d imagined myself using the gun, stalking from room to room, sparing us all the pain of exposure, not only myself but her and Alden and Kristin. The inner editor was on the job, and I was grateful for it. It was almost impossible now, sitting over cups of coffee, to imagine I had ever entertained such a thought, and it was one that never needed to be shared.

“I’ll never use it,” I said. “It can stay where it is, locked away in its drawer, doing no harm to anyone. And to hell with Chekhov.”

Chekhov puzzled her, until I explained the reference. She agreed the revolver could stay locked away forever. It didn’t need to be fired before the final curtain.

“So your name was originally—” She broke off the sentence, held up a hand. “No, don’t tell me, because I’m going to let myself forget it. It’s not your name. Your name is John James Thompson, and that’s who you are. That’s the name of the man I fell in love with and married and had a baby with, and I’m Louella Thompson, Mrs. John James Thompson, and that’s all we need to know about names. John, I love you more than ever.”

“And I you.”

“And I am so glad we had this conversation. I always told myself that you and I could tell each other anything and it would be all right. And it’s more than all right, isn’t it? I feel closer to you than ever.” She looked away for a moment. “Sooner or later,” she said, “we’ll have to tell Kristin.”

“But not yet.”

“No, it would be way too much for her to process. At least I think it would. Or she might just roll her eyes. ‘Like I didn’t already know that, Mom.’ ”

“God, I can hear her saying it. But with a question mark at the end.”

“Just a trace of Valley Girl.” She drew a breath. “We’ll know when it’s time, and how to tell her what she needs to know.”

“Yes.”

“And whatever happens,” she said, “we’ll get through this.”

I’ve sat down at the computer a couple of times over the last month, but the need to add words and sentences to this document seems to have subsided.

I’m sure it’s a result of those two conversations, first with Alden and then with Louella. I spent some months writing down secrets, things I’d thought and imagined and done about which I could never tell anyone. And then, having shared my secrets with the two most important people in my life, I no longer needed to share them with my hard drive.

Still, habits want to persist. On a few occasions I would find myself sitting here, where I’d write down a sentence or two only to erase it — not because it needed to be erased, but because it had never needed to be written in the first place. Then long moments, some spent reading over what I’d written, some spent doing nothing at all, and then a few words or a sentence, and then I’d erase that, too, and eventually I’d close the file and shut off the computer and go back downstairs.

But it seems to me I should make note of what happened this evening. I was in the living room reading a magazine; we’d watched Jeopardy, and after we all answered the Final Jeopardy question (or supplied a question for the Final Jeopardy answer), Louella and Kristin settled in with whatever was on HGTV. Alden gave me a significant look, and I put down my magazine and followed him onto the porch, where he told me he couldn’t be 100 % positive, but he thought he’d managed to remove his sister’s DNA from the agency’s database.

“Maybe not remove it,” he said, “because nowadays I don’t think anybody can ever remove anything, and pretty soon they’ll stop bothering to put DELETE keys on computers. But I think I fixed it so nobody can get access to it. Like if somebody submits his DNA and they look for matches and near matches, the way they do, well, they won’t find out what genes they share with Kristin.”

How had he managed that?

“I’m not positive I did,” he said, “because to find out for sure I’d have to figure out a way to test it, and how do I do that and make sure I’m not raising any red flags in the process? But what I did, I got a lawyer to call them and say how she was a minor, and her DNA was submitted without her permission or the permission of her lawful guardian. So they were on notice not to communicate with her in any manner, or to provide information about her DNA profile to anyone, or even to keep her genetic information on file. What’s the matter?”

“The lawyer,” I said. “Who did you use?”

“Edward P. Hammerschmidt.”

“How much did you have to tell him?”

“Uh, I didn’t tell him anything.”

“Well, you must have,” I said. “You couldn’t just write out a script for him. How would he know what to say? And how could he keep from wondering what kind of a secret we had to be sitting on? And—”

“Dad.”

“And where the hell did you find him, anyway? I can’t claim to know every lawyer in Allen County, but Hammerschmidt’s a name I’d recognize if I’d ever come across it before, and I didn’t, so—”

“Dad?”

I looked up.

“Dad, I made him up. I got this DNA guy on the phone, I forget his name, and I said I was Edward P. Hammerschmidt, attorney in fact for the legal guardian of a minor child, and, well, I rattled it off.”

“And he bought it?” I thought about it. “Well,” I said, “why wouldn’t he?”

“That’s what I figured.”

“Easy enough to comply with your request and avoid whatever action you might take. That doesn’t mean the data will completely disappear from their system.”

“There’s probably no way to make that happen. I mean, even if that’s what he tried to do, would he even be able to do it? A hundred percent?”

“Seems unlikely.”

“It’d be like if somebody tells you to forget something ever happened. People say that all the time, but nobody expects you to erase something from your memory, because how could you even do that? ‘Okay, I’ll forget I saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus.’ But if nobody can access Kristy’s data, and if nobody gets emails saying there’s a young girl in Ohio who’s a probable second cousin—”

“Then it’s as good as erased.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Anyway, I figured it was worth a shot.”

He is, as I’ve noted before, a resourceful young man, and no one could wish for a better son. It’s impossible to calculate percentages, but I’m confident that his five-minute phone call has improved my chances.

I feel safer now, I was about to write (and in fact did write it, in this very sentence, but never mind). But is it so? I’m aware that I’m more likely to escape detection than I was before he passed himself off as Edward P. Hammerschmidt, Esq. But knowing isn’t feeling, so the question arises: Do I feel any safer now?

And here’s what I’ve just realized: I don’t feel any safer, because I don’t need an increased feeling of safety — and that’s because I haven’t felt myself to be in any genuine peril ever since those two conversations, first with Alden and then with Louella.

They didn’t render me any safer. They didn’t lessen the likelihood that a cold case in Bakersfield would warm up and reach all the way to Lima.

But what they succeeded in doing was making me feel safe. There’s a sense now that nothing can really touch me, that the people who matter in my life — and matter so much more than I ever thought anyone could matter — that they know all my secrets, and love me as much as they ever did.

As much? Arguably more. The husband and father they know is less armored, less hidden.

And if the secret they now know is monstrous, it doesn’t seem to have led them to regard me as a monster. I may have done something monstrous, I may even be said to have gone through a Monster Phase, but—

“But that was in another country. And besides, the wench is dead.”

The line is Christopher Marlowe’s, from The Jew of Malta, a play I’ve neither seen nor read. I’ve no idea where I came across it, though I could probably guess why it stuck in my mind sufficiently to make me Google it just now. The speaker’s crime was fornication, surely a lesser offense than homicide, but the similarities are undeniable. It was indeed in another state, if not another country. And, yes, God rest her soul — the wench is dead.

I’d told Louella that I’d made love to her in advance of our conversation because I thought it might be for the last time. Even if she accepted what I was about to tell her, even if we stood together as husband and wife and went on sharing a bedroom, it seemed possible that her new knowledge would rule out physical intimacy.

But it wasn’t more than a day or two after our conversation that she yawned theatrically and announced that she could barely keep her eyes open. On that occasion, and twice since then, what she now knew did nothing to diminish her ardor and enthusiasm.

And who knows, really, what else she brings to the bedchamber? She knows I killed a woman, and to be comfortable in my embrace she has to wall off that knowledge in some chamber of her memory.

But how impermeable is that wall? Perhaps she leaves an opening, perhaps she allows herself now and then to rub up against what she knows. Perhaps her passion is heightened by imagining what I might do — while knowing that I won’t.

Isn’t that why people go to horror movies? So that they can relish the thrill of fear in an unthreatening environment? What’s on the screen scares them, but does so in a safe way. It’s an illusion, up there on the screen, and they’re in the audience with a bag of popcorn, or at home on the couch with the remote control in their hands.

And doesn’t that help explain the audience for true crime shows? There are a couple of cable channels devoted exclusively to them, while the broadcast networks keep pumping out Dateline and 48 Hours. The abiding majority of cases feature women as victims, which may not come as a surprise, but here’s something I only recently learned, and did find surprising: the audience for these programs is predominantly female.

On the screen, it’s a woman who gets herself shot or stabbed or strangled. And it’s a man who does the killing, and the husband or boyfriend is almost always a suspect, and more often than not he’s guilty.

And the woman watching can hardly escape thinking of her own man. He’s in his basement workshop trimming out a model plane, or in his den with his stamp collection. Or walking the family dog, or having a beer with his buddies.

And he would never do anything like the husband on the television screen.

Would he?

Maybe that’s part of it. And, if it is, what business is it of mine?

I can’t know everything that’s going on in her mind, her heart, her deepest self. Nor can she know all my innermost secrets, the deepest of which I’m sure are unknown even to me.

“I’m so sleepy,” she’ll say, with something that is not quite a twinkle in her eye. “I think you should get some rest,” I’ll respond.

And, while we become as close as two human beings can possibly be, each of us is off somewhere, listening to some personal music that no one else can ever hear.

A decision this afternoon, not unexpected, from Alden. He’ll be starting college in September at Ohio State’s Lima campus. That means he can live at home. In fact it’s a virtual necessity, as OSU-Lima doesn’t have dormitories.

He had applied, at his guidance counselor’s urging, to five schools, and was accepted at all of them. The only strong contender, beside OSU-Lima, was the university’s main campus in Columbus. That’s where he’ll almost certainly go to vet school, and there he’d have the traditional college life of football games and fraternities and pep rallies and beer blasts, or as much of it as still exists these days.

I thought he might want all that, thought too that he’d get a better undergraduate education at Columbus than the local school could offer. And he would indeed have a richer menu of courses to choose from, and a more illustrious faculty, but he’s sure OSU-Lima will get him into grad school at Columbus, and that’s all he wants from it.

I’d be paying a few thousand dollars a year less for his tuition this way, he pointed out, and of course I’d be saving money on dorm fees and meals, plus he’d get to eat his mother’s cooking instead of whatever mystery meat they served up in the school cafeteria.

But the biggest factor was his apprenticeship with Ralph, which could continue during his four undergraduate years. “By the time I finish,” he said, “I’ll probably be more qualified than most vet school graduates. In fact Ralph says I should be able to fit in some original research while I’m at Columbus. Not that you’d need that on your résumé in order to give rabies shots, but I think it’d be cool.”

And wasn’t he concerned that he might be missing something?

“What, like in Animal House? Come on.”

So he’ll be here, under our roof, and the money his decision will save me, while certainly welcome, is nothing compared to the pleasure of having him here for the next four years.

Best of all is knowing that this is what he wants, that he’d rather stay in Lima than move a hundred miles east to the state capital. That he’d rather live at home. With his mother and sister. And me.

And it wasn’t hard to figure out what to get him in June.

“Besides,” he’d said at one point, “if I did go to Columbus, you know I’d be coming home one or two weekends a month. That’s a couple of hours wasted each way, plus the cost of the gas. And there’s the wear and tear on the Subaru. I mean it’s okay here in town, you know, but I don’t know how long it’ll hold up, you know?”

I’m already looking forward to the two of us on a joint mission to pick out his graduation present.

I just looked at the most recent entry. Before I write what I came upstairs to write, I feel compelled to note that Alden and I shopped around shortly before the principal handed him his high school diploma, and he’s now driving a new steel-blue Hyundai Elantra.

“Are you sure, Dad? Brand new? I figured, you know, pre-owned.”

I told him I was afraid he’d have to do the pre-owning, for whoever might buy it after he’d traded it in.

“No way,” he said, patting a fender. “I’m keeping this baby forever.”

And what he said an hour or so ago was, “Whoever that guy’s supposed to be, he doesn’t look like anybody I’ve ever seen.”

He was referring to two black-and-white photographs, both of the same subject. The first showed a teenage male, looking uncomfortable in a plaid jacket and a striped tie, a rigid half-smile on his face. The second looked at first to be a picture of the boy’s father, but it was in fact the youth himself, transformed through some combination of artistic license and computer magic into a middle-aged man.

He was still wearing the jacket and tie, but both garments had been altered — updated, I suppose. Each had lost its pattern, so that he appeared to be wearing a blazer and a dark tie. One’s imagination colored the new image — a navy blazer, a maroon necktie.

His hairline was higher, his brow lined, his features showing the years. One thing that hadn’t changed was his facial expression. He still looked posed and uncomfortable, and as if he’d have preferred to be standing almost anywhere other than in front of this camera. That sort of expression and attitude was somehow better suited to an adolescent than to a mature man, but I don’t suppose a computer could be readily programmed to give instructions to the subject of a doctored photograph: “Grow up, sonny. Get over yourself.”

“Breaking news,” Lester Holt had said, as he almost invariably does as a prelude to whatever news item is next on the agenda. Through the technological breakthrough of genetic forensics (or perhaps he said forensic genetics), cold case investigators in Bakersfield, California, had determined the identity of the alleged perpetrator of a rape and murder that took place half a century ago.

We were on the living room sofa, all four of us. TiVo had been silently recording the NBC Nightly News while we finished dinner, and with the table cleared and the plates loaded in the dishwasher, we’d sat down to watch it as we did more nights than not. It never takes much more than twenty minutes of our time, as we can speed through commercials; even so, Kristin’s rarely there for more than half of it.

She was still sitting next to her mother tonight when they showed the photos, the original and the new improved version, individually at first, then side by side. We also got to see what’s probably the only extant photo of Cindy Raschmann, one I recognized not because it resembled my memory of her but because I’d seen it in earlier coverage of the case.

They gave the name of the man, whom they were careful to call the alleged killer. He was Roger E. Borden, and he’d evidently disappeared without a trace after having left home not long after his high school graduation, several years before the rape and murder of Ms. Raschmann. Where he’d gone, what he’d done, and what had led him to Bakersfield seemed to be unknown, as did whatever course his life might have taken after the incident.

There was at present no way to know if Borden was alive or dead; if alive, he could be virtually anywhere, although almost all of the persons with whom he shared DNA seemed to be located west of the Rocky Mountains. But, NBC’s breathless reporter on the scene stressed, this was very much an ongoing investigation, and authorities were optimistic that more information would be forthcoming. Meanwhile, there was an 800 number for viewers to call if they had information about Roger Borden’s life before or after the murder. Or if they recognized the man in the photos, and had knowledge of where he might be living now.

We sat in silence, watching. They cut to a commercial, and it took a moment before Alden picked up the remote and hit the Fast Forward button. Kristin picked that moment to head off to her room, and once she was out of earshot someone could have said something, but no one did.

I didn’t pay much attention to the rest of the newscast. My eyes saw what they showed on the screen, my ears took in what they had to say, but nothing really registered. I was waiting to see if they’d show the two photographs again, my long-ago yearbook photo and its aged version, but it wasn’t that urgent an item, and once was enough.

Alden turned off the TV, and broke the silence that followed with his pronouncement: The man on the screen was no one he’d ever seen before.

I of course had recognized the yearbook photo immediately. I even remembered the sport jacket, and the tie. I’d only owned two or three ties, and rarely needed to wear one. The one in the photo, I seemed to remember, was striped in red and navy. But I wouldn’t swear to that.

As for the older version, I don’t know that it looked much like the face I see in the mirror every morning. But I recognized myself in it, perhaps because I could see the young Roger Borden staring back at me through the older Roger Borden’s eyes.

But did it look like the man I’d become over the years?

Hard to say.

What I did say was that NBC had very likely given the item more attention than it would get on the other networks. A couple of years ago they’d included Cindy Raschmann’s murder in a Dateline episode covering three cold cases. That didn’t give them proprietary rights in the matter, but it had supplied them with clips and footage, along with an opportunity to plug Dateline.

“We may see those pictures again,” I said. “Or we may not. It depends what response they get.”

“Calls to that 800 number,” Louella said.

“People who went to school with me, or think they did. People who saw me just last week at the Greyhound station in Spokane, or on a park bench in Oakland. People who can detect a resemblance between that picture and the grouchy neighbor they’ve never liked, and always wondered about.”

“ ‘You rotten kids get off my lawn!’ ” Alden said.

“Ideally, they’ll get a few dozen calls, all of them from the West Coast. And long before they’ve finished checking them all out, everyone will forget about tonight’s news.”

“That picture? Kristy didn’t even look twice at it.”

“No.”

“She could have said, ‘Hey, you know who that looks like?’ The way you’d say the dog on The Simpsons was acting like Chester. But she didn’t.”

No, she hadn’t.

“So maybe you looked like that once. But not anymore.”

And so we reassured each other that there was nothing to worry about. And here I am at my desk, wondering if I believe it.

Hard to say. Hard to know what to believe, and how anxious to be.

Just now, I opened the top center drawer of my desk. I was looking for the key that opens the locked drawer, and I found it readily enough, but didn’t pick it up, didn’t even touch it. All I did was look at it for a moment before I closed the drawer again.

To reassure myself that it was there? And that, by extension, the locked drawer was mine to open?

Maybe.

I always knew this could happen. I had hoped that it wouldn’t, but had known all along that it might. I can’t say I’d anticipated seeing my young self on the television screen, nor had I ever imagined a computer-aged version.

But I had relatives who’d submitted DNA, and when the right person looked in the right place, a match would turn up. And one thing would lead to another, and before too long they’d have the name of the brother who’d just plain vanished.

If America’s Most Wanted were still on the air, its next episode would show those photos, and whatever else they could turn up. But the program went off the air a few years ago.

Well, they did have a run of almost twenty-five years. That’s pretty good. And I’ve had an even longer run, haven’t I?

I don’t know where this goes. I can’t rule out the possibility that someone right here in Lima will have seen something in those photographs. Someone who knows me from one of my clubs, someone who’s seen me at the store. Or walking in the neighborhood, or standing in line at the grocery store.

Someone who knows only that there’s something vaguely familiar about the guy in the picture. And then, a day or a week later, he catches a glimpse of me and the bell rings or the penny drops, however you want to put it, and it all comes together for him.

Should he pick up the phone, call the number? You don’t want to get involved, and you certainly don’t want to make trouble for an innocent man, but how often do you get a chance to solve a horrible crime and bring a vicious killer to justice? When you do, how can you shirk your responsibilities?

But of course you didn’t bother to write down the 800 number, so maybe you should just let it go. If the connection’s a real one, you can’t be the only person who made it. Let someone else pick up the phone.

Still, how hard would it be to Google your way to the number?

And so on.

All I can do is wait. And that may not be easy, but neither will it be impossible, because God knows it’s something I know how to do.

I’ve been waiting for all these years.

Three weeks since my last entry.

Not quite. It was nineteen days ago that Lester Holt showed my high school yearbook photo to his substantial and far-flung audience. It may have appeared elsewhere — on other network news broadcasts, on true-crime cable channels. The only newspaper I read regularly is the Lima News, and it would be bad news indeed if my picture showed up there, as that would only happen after I’d been arrested and charged.

I pick up the New York Times now and then, and USA Today once in a while, but I haven’t seen either in the past three weeks. In fact I’ve made it a point not to look at them, or to check them out online. I’m sure the news item got attention in and around Bakersfield, and there’d surely be coverage in the local paper there at least as extensive as NBC’s, but I don’t feel the need to see it. And I doubt the Bakersfield Californian has many regular readers in western Ohio.

Easy enough to Google Roger Borden and see what shows up.

Easier still not to bother.

I did have the impulse, immediately after I got to see myself on NBC, to do what I could to make myself less visible. I could show up less frequently at the store, and spend more of my time there out of sight in the office in back. I could use the excuse of a bad back to skip a couple of bowling sessions; all of my teammates are apt to be sidelined now and then by a backache or a troublesome knee or some other age-appropriate infirmity.

I could miss a few meetings of my clubs and civic groups, and make fewer lunch dates. I could even invent a pretext — a household retailers’ convention, the funeral of an imaginary relative — and leave town for a week or two.

There was some logic to all of that. Why put my face where people might see it before time had given them a chance to forget what they’d glimpsed on TV? Wasn’t it better to keep my exposure to a minimum?

I shared the notion with Louella, and she thought it over. “Where would you go?” she wondered. “And what would you do when you got there?”

“Some chain motel,” I said. “At some Interstate exit in Indiana or Kentucky.”

“In other words, out of state.”

“I would think, though I’m not sure it would make any difference. As far as what I’d do there, probably as little as possible. Sit in my room, read a book, watch a movie on TV. Go to the nearest diner for my meals.”

“The same place every time?”

“Maybe not. Maybe I’d pick up fast food at a drive-through window. Or order in.”

“You might get tired of pizza.”

“I’m tired already just thinking about it. You know what? It’s not a good idea.”

“No.”

“I’d be that guy who never leaves his room and has all his meals delivered. Pays in cash, too, and what’s that about? And when I did go out, anybody who caught sight of me would see a stranger, and wonder if I looked familiar, and if they’d seen me anywhere before.”

“While anybody who sees you at Thompson Dawes or the bowling alley would think Oh, there’s John.”

“ ‘Good old John. Hell of a nice guy.’ ”

“They’d know right off who you were and wouldn’t have to waste time thinking about you.”

“And thinking about me,” I said, “has always been a waste of time. But you’re right. Better to be seen by people who don’t have to wonder who it is they’re looking at.”

And so I’ve been living my life, doing what I’ve always done, going where I’ve always gone. It seems to me that the best way to draw unwanted attention is to make an effort to avoid it. Shrink into the shadows and people want to get a clearer view of you. Act as if you have something to hide and people can’t help wondering what it might be.

This didn’t mean that I had to overcompensate, shouldering my way into any spotlight, asserting my opinion in every conversation. The answer, I decided, lay somewhere in the middle: “Just be yourself.”

Whoever that might be.

It feels strange.

It’s been almost a full year since the last entry. I rarely go more than a few days between visits to my home office, and I generally boot up the laptop and do what one does on one’s computer. I cope with email, I visit some websites I find interesting, I even make occasional entries in a rudimentary daybook I’ve taken to keeping.

It’s nothing like this document, where I’ve allowed myself to think out loud.

Well, not out loud, obviously. How to phrase it? To ruminate in print, or perhaps in pixels. To do my thinking on screen.

I jot things down, keep certain records. My weight, on which my doctor wants me to keep an eye. My blood pressure, for which I now take a pill every morning.

The same annual physical which occasioned these measures led Alden and Kristin to buy me a birthday present, a wristwatch I’m to wear 24/7, except when I take it off to recharge it. It tells me far more than the time, monitoring my heartbeat and keeping track of my physical activity.

If the device had its way, I’d take upwards of ten thousand steps every day. That would presumably make my physician happy, even as it would lead to my wearing out my shoes faster, but I’m not all that certain it would have a discernible effect on either my weight or my blood pressure. There are days when I log ten thousand steps, and there are days when I don’t, and I don’t get all that worked up about it one way or the other.

Still, one has to pay a certain amount of attention to the damned thing. I’ll look at it, and see that I’m less than a thousand steps short of my daily goal, and as often as not I’ll grab the leash and whistle up Chester for a walk around the block. Sometimes, of course, I’ll say the hell with it and make myself a sandwich instead, but all in all our faithful Rottweiler gets more exercise than he used to, and so, I must admit, do I.

And if I remember, I log the day’s step count in my daybook, along with my weight and blood pressure and anything else I feel like keeping track of.

Bowling scores. Books I’m reading.

Odds and ends.

The daybook’s a habit I got into without much thought, and it’s only now that I can see I can’t attribute it solely to my birthday present. Now that I’ve opened up this file, which began with my recalling significant chunks of my past and led to my recording day-to-day developments, I realize how much a part of my life it had become.

It was the place where I could tell myself what I’d never told myself before, a place for all those matters I couldn’t mention to anyone else. I was selective, I’d run sentences through my mind before I wrote them out, but most of what went on inside me wound up on the computer screen in one form or another.

And even when I elected not to jot something down, or did so only to delete it, it got more of my attention than it would otherwise have received. At this desk, on this computer, with my eyes on the screen and my fingers poised above the keyboard, I had no choice but to look at myself and my life a little differently.

I guess that’s obvious.

Maybe it’s time for me to read what I’ve written. All of it, top to bottom.

So I’m here, and after typing the last sentence I sat down and read the last entry from a year ago, and then I scrolled all the way up to the very beginning of the file and read through everything that preceded it. All of it, all the way from A man walks into a bar to Just be yourself, whoever that might be.

A curious experience. There were sections I could almost take in at a glance, so familiar to me, so much a part of my consciousness, that I could probably have reproduced them word for word. And there were other passages I could only barely recall, as if I’d come across them in a dream.

I’m struck by how the tone has changed over time. It’s as if several different men have shared the task of narration. At first we hear Buddy, and somewhere along the way he passes the microphone to Mr. Thompson. And now it’s in the hands of Old Man Thompson, still reasonably hale and hearty but mellowed and rendered more pensive by the passing years.

And still a free man. There were indeed a handful of people who’d thought they recognized the two photographs of Roger Borden, one as he once was, the other as he might have grown to be. In a few instances the recognition was real enough; they’d gone to school with Roger, or remembered him from the neighborhood. That was enough to get them to call the 800 number, but it didn’t give them anything useful to report. Yes, I remember Roger. The last person you’d figure would do something like that. Or, just as likely: That’s Roger, all right. You know, there was always something about him. So I can’t say I’m surprised.

Right.

Others must have been more promising, and in the long run more of a nuisance. They were from viewers who were fairly certain they recognized the man who was being sought, that he was assistant produce manager of a supermarket in Bend, Oregon, or a night clerk at a none-too-reputable motel outside of Boise, or their own next-door neighbor, who revealed his own dark nature when a neighborhood dog had an accident on his lawn.

And so on.

Promising, because those were the sort of leads the police could not ignore. And a nuisance because they never led anywhere.

Did anyone turn up who thought that the kid in the sport coat and striped tie, given a change of clothes, might have filled their gas tank back in the day? Did anybody remember seeing Buddy across a liquor-store counter, or grabbing a burger at Denny’s?

If so, I never heard about it.

As far as I can make out, the long arm of the law never reached over the Rockies, let alone across the Mississippi River or the Ohio state line. My guess is the state and local authorities congratulated themselves on having taken it as far as they had, and getting prime air time on a network newscast. The response let them feel good about their efforts, and they could even draw some measure of satisfaction from the essentially useless confirmation, furnished by my one-time schoolmates and neighbors, that the picture on the screen was indeed that of young Roger. They already knew that, but wouldn’t it gladden their hearts all the same?

And I think I can guess the prevailing attitude once every lead had been shown to lead nowhere. If I were involved in the investigation, it seems to me I’d take note of a couple undeniable facts about Roger Borden. First of all, he’d committed what looked like a random and impulsive murder all those years ago — and had never been arrested since, for any infraction of the law.

All those years? A drifter, capable of homicide, never getting picked up and charged with anything?

I’d think about that, and I’d think about just how many years it had been, and how old he’d have to be now. Living the life he must have led, very likely abusing drugs and alcohol, capable of violence, ruled by his impulses, almost certainly a sociopath.

And another thing. All those years, and all those brothers and sisters, and he’d never been in touch with any of them? No drunken phone calls? No urgent appeals for cash, or a night’s lodging? Nothing? They’d been in touch with everybody, every surviving relative, every classmate they could find, and not a single person had had a single word from him since he killed that girl.

Well, hell, do the math. The son of a bitch would have to be dead by now, wouldn’t you say? I mean, what are the odds?

I’m sure it’s still an open case. And I’m sure the cable channels, with their apparently unquenchable appetite for true crime, will do what they can to keep Cindy Raschmann — and Roger Borden — from slipping entirely out of sight. But there’s always someone with a new solution to the unknowable identity of Jack the Ripper, or freshly discovered positive proof as to the actual authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. That’s enough to draw a little media attention, but it never seems to amount to very much.

So it really does look as though I’ve gotten away with it.

This evening — and it’s early morning at this point, closer to daybreak than to bedtime — this evening, as I was reading, I found myself wondering if anybody ever gets away with anything. Who I am, what I’ve become, the life I’ve led and am leading now, are all part of a direct progression that began when a man walked into a bar.

I’ve had, as it turns out, a rich and satisfying life. I’m sure it looks enviable from a distance — a fairly prosperous businessman, active in civic affairs, still in reasonably good health, a devoted husband and father genuinely loved by his wife and children.

Not a few men would look at me and wish they could trade places.

And it’s at least as satisfying from my point of view. I never could have predicted anything like this for myself. I’d never have dreamed of it, wished for it, imagined it as attainable.

And I’ve so utterly grown into it that it seems the life I was born to lead.

But, lest I forget, it could still all end tomorrow. Someone somewhere could be struck by a blinding flash of recognition. By God, that photograph! You know who that has to be?

And then a phone call.

That’s always something that could happen, and it will continue to be a possibility for as long as I am alive. The moving finger writes, or doesn’t write. And no one can say which it’ll be.

And if it happens?

I’m sure the revolver’s still in the locked drawer. And I’m at least as sure that it will remain there, no matter who shows up on our front porch. I can’t say whether that would be the easy or the hard way out, but it’s not one I’ll choose.

For now, all I know is it’s way past my bedtime, and I’d like to get a couple of hours of sleep before I get up to face another day.

Whatever happens, I have the feeling I’ll be okay with it.